I just downloaded the newest edition of iTunes from the apple website, to organize my music collection and get some more of my CDs ripped. I've been ripping music and using MP3s since the mid 90's. I can remember they days of hand patching codec into tweaked media software and ripping from single speed cd burners. iTunes is by far and away the most user friendly digital music organizer/ripper/encoder I've ever used. I installed it while talking on the phone, popped a CD in, and without even bothering to look over any of the documentation or even the menus, I just right clicked and there was the CD ripping comman right there. Perfectly intuitive. I ripped five cds while talking to my friend.

Fantastic program. And the compression on the AAC format is much better than MP3

It has some amazing features for editing songs and changing ID3 tags quickly and easily. But there are a number of functionalities that limit your options a lot and Im picky with the way I like to do things.

It has some amazing features for editing songs and changing ID3 tags quickly and easily. But there are a number of functionalities that limit your options a lot and Im picky with the way I like to do things.

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Interesting. What do you feel is counterintuitive? As much as I hate apple's snobbery they do have a firm grip on designing intuitive soft/hardware interfaces.

Originally posted by Nephilim Interesting. What do you feel is counterintuitive?

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I don't like how much control it takes over organizing your music. As I've said before I'm extremely anal and like to organize my music how I want, not how it thinks it should be organized. For instance, upon first install never ever check the option to let it organize your music for you. It goes through and moves all your files and categorizes them based solely on the ID3 tags. If information is missing, it will not know where to put them and instead create multiple levels of "unknown" folders. That's a pain. Fortunately a friend of mine had that happen to him and not me. It took him two weeks to fix it. I have all my file names perfectly labeled, but not the ID3 tags. So I would have been in a similar situation.

Also another complaint of mine about the library is that if you want to have a custom library of files (not necessarily your entire music collection) and want to change that from time to time you can accidentally delete files off your hard disk by removing them from the library. Any program that enables you to delete files completely by removing them from a library/playlist is just asking for trouble. Not a great way to lose a couple hundred mp3s.

Playlists are another thing. When you make a playlist you must use the structure from your library to do it. You can't for example take files from an outside source to do it without adding them to your library. The real horrible thing is if the files are already in your library it will double up the songs in the library. Thats definitely stupid. Playlists in general are pretty cumbersome to construct. Winamp has by far the best playlist setup for both creating and organizing them the way you want. Simply add a directory and go. Sort however you want.

The ripping and burning isnt any easier or better than what I use. Ive been using CDex for ripping and it has been just as easy. Doesnt take any thought to rip songs quickly and efficiently. For burning Ive always used Nero and dont plan on changing anytime soon. Many more options for burning music how you want.

Im generaly a little more demanding of applications and the all-in-one type packages have more and more weaknesses the more things they try to do at once. Chances are there are a few specialty programs that concentrate on the task at hand and let you do it the way you want.

Again I think for a lot of people its a great program. Its just not for me because it takes everything out of the user's hands. I dont like that.

I have been called upon to try and salvage some MP3 files this app has thoughtfully removed from people's PC's, sometimes several hundred MB worth at a time. Not fun to have to tell folks that their expensive collection got wiped out by an expensive application, when Windows overwrites the data before I can get to it...

Having seen the end results of these problems, and having seen iTunes in action while at client's homes, I just can't see why folks would go for this service.

After all, a savvy friend of mine, who used to be a client, uses Windows to grab any tunes he wants from streaming Internet radio broadcasts. That same method ought to work from any input whatsoever, unless the Apple crew found a way to disable that function while iTunes is running...wouldn't surprise me a bit. Though a properly networked remote PC running Linux or even XP ought to be able to intercept the stream, and w/o iTunes running on it you could... whooops...okay, I'll stop now...

Anyhow, although his files are initially in the huge .wav format, after a few minutes with CDex and they are tidy little MP3's, ready for archiving or burning.

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